Saturday, May 28, 2016

Wolves, cattle collide south of Grand Teton Nat'l Park

\Posted: Saturday, May 28, 2016

By Mike Koshmrl
Jackson Hole Daily

A Lucas family
rancher suspects that a wolf with a history of killing his cattle has
fallen back on old habits near the southern border of Grand Teton
National Park. A half-eaten calf turned up Monday, and Russ Lucas said
that “two or three” other calves have gone missing from his herd of 150
that grazes the flats between the Gros Ventre River and East Gros Ventre
Butte. When the carcass of the week-old animal was discovered, Lucas
phoned Wyoming Game and Fish Department carnivore biologist Mike Boyce,
who examined the dead calf. “I went out and investigated it,” Boyce
said, “and based on the tracks at the kill site and the bite-mark
evidence on the calf we verified it as a wolf kill.”

Boyce turned the
case over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service because wolves are a
managed as “threatened” in Wyoming under the Endangered Species Act.
Fish and Wildlife personnel who are standing in for recently retired
Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Coordinator Mike Jimenez didn’t have
specific information about the incident. “We’ve had probably a half a
dozen different depredation incidents in the past week, and they’re all
around the range,” said Mike Thabault,
USFWS assistant regional director
for ecological services. “We’ve had some around Cody, we’ve had some
around the park, we’ve had some a little further south.”

Lucas’
suspicion is that the marauding wolves are the remnants of the Lower
Gros Ventre Pack, which claimed three of his cattle back in 2013. That
year wildlife managers killed 11 wolves out of the pack, but two
survivors were left behind, annual reports show. Lucas recalled just one
surviving lobo. “There was one wolf that they couldn’t take out,” Lucas
said. “She went up in the park. “And we feel like this could be the
same wolf from that pack,” he said.

More recently, annual reports show
the Lower Gros Ventre Pack has grown back to five animals. The quintet
of canines was credited for killing two cattle in 2015, though Lucas
said he hasn’t had any problems with wolves for a few years. It’s
unclear what, if any, retribution will fall upon the veal-eating wolf
pack.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services is the
agency that would typically kill depredating wolves at the request of
Fish and Wildlife. Mike Foster, Wildlife Service’s Wyoming director, did
not return phone calls Friday. Lucas said he tried and failed to get a
permit to lethally remove the wolves himself. He has held the permits in
the past, but has never successfully caught a wolf in the act of a
depredation. “Usually when you lose one calf you get a kill permit,” he
said, “and they wouldn’t give me a kill permit.”

Taxpayers, Lucas said,
foot a substantial bill when federal wildlife managers fly planes or
helicopters to aerially gun down depredating wolves, and their
operations might be targeting the wrong animals, he said. “It’s a hell
of a lot cheaper if I did it,” Lucas said. “And you get the wolf that’s
killing them.”

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone